HPC Carpentry, University of Alberta

May 28 & 29, 2018

9:00am - 4:30pm

Instructors:
Alex Razoumov, Kamil Marcinkowski

Helpers:
TBD

General Information

HPC Carpentry is a new workshop in the beta development phase for inclusion in The Carpentries. In is designed to teach how to interact with a compute cluster. The first lesson, Intro to HPC, is a general introduction to the bash command line and submitting jobs on a typical HPC cluster. The second lesson in this workshop focuses on creating parallel programs that execute across one or more compute nodes. Each lesson takes roughly a full day.

Workshops are intended to be fully interactive and taught in the “Software Carpentry” format: instruction is done live, with learners coding along with workshop instructors. Frequent excercises and test problems have been added to ensure students have a chance to try things on their own. No prior computing experience is required or expected.

Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a
Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges
on. They should have a few specific software packages installed (listed
below). They are also required to abide by
Code of Conduct.

Accessibility: We are committed to making this workshop
accessible to everybody.
The workshop organizers have checked that:

The room is wheelchair / scooter accessible.

Accessible restrooms are available.

Materials will be provided in advance of the workshop and
large-print handouts are available if needed by notifying the
organizers in advance. If we can help making learning easier for
you (e.g. sign-language interpreters, lactation facilities) please
get in touch (using contact details below) and we will
attempt to provide them.

Surveys

Schedule

The content that will be covered in this workshop is found at https://hpc-carpentry.github.io/. The first day will cover the “Introduction to High Performance Computing” content and the second day will cover “Parallel Computing with Chapel”.

Windows

Keep "Use Git from the Windows Command Prompt" selected and click on "Next".
If you forgot to do this programs that you need for the workshop will not work properly.
If this happens rerun the installer and select the appropriate option.

If your "HOME" environment variable is not set (or you don't know what this is):

Open command prompt (Open Start Menu then type cmd and press [Enter])

Type the following line into the command prompt window exactly as shown:

setx HOME "%USERPROFILE%"

Press [Enter], you should see SUCCESS: Specified value was saved.

Quit command prompt by typing exit then pressing [Enter]

This will provide you with both Git and Bash in the Git Bash program.

macOS

The default shell in all versions of macOS is Bash, so no
need to install anything. You access Bash from the Terminal
(found in
/Applications/Utilities).
See the Git installation video tutorial
for an example on how to open the Terminal.
You may want to keep
Terminal in your dock for this workshop.

Linux

The default shell is usually Bash, but if your
machine is set up differently you can run it by opening a
terminal and typing bash. There is no need to
install anything.

Text Editor

When you're writing code, it's nice to have a text editor that is
optimized for writing code, with features like automatic
color-coding of key words. The default text editor on macOS and
Linux is usually set to Vim, which is not famous for being
intuitive. if you accidentally find yourself stuck in it, try
typing the escape key, followed by :q! (colon, lower-case 'q',
exclamation mark), then hitting Return to return to the shell.

Windows

nano is a basic editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop.
To install it,
download the
Windows installer
and double click on the file to run it.
This installer requires an active internet connection.

Others editors that you can use are
Notepad++ or
Sublime Text.
Be aware that you must
add its installation directory to your system path.
Please ask your instructor to help you do this.

macOS

nano is a basic editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop.
See the Git installation video tutorial
for an example on how to open nano.
It should be pre-installed.